Thursday, December 9, 2010

So my plan was to gather as much ore as I could on day one of Cataclysm and max my mining as soon as I created my Electrostatic Converter. Cold is a Miner / Engineer so my strategy has been to gather and sell everything I collect. Gems are selling for around 175g each, volatiles 10-50g each, and ores are all over the board, but 200g a stack elementium ore isn't too shabby. After I turned in my 25 daily quests, here's how I maxed my mining very quickly.

Used my Fate Rune of Fleet Feet which I had bought from the witch in Icecrown with 15 Vrykul Bones. Wowhead comments say it doesn't work while mounted, but it sure looked like it to me.

I highly recommend this exact strategy when grinding up your miner as it is very quick, skips the heavily player quest areas, and gets you mining and selling the higher value ores much faster than using a regular zone progression. Uldum is excellent for mining while a lower level as the mobs are not close to mineral nodes, so no killing is required. This Cataclysm mining strategy was a modification, but very similar, to one of the strategies listed in The Cataclysm Mastery System.

Elementium Ore Sweet Spot in Uldum

Elementium Ore Uldum Sweet Spot

While farming the mining nodes in the new Cataclysm zone Uldum, I found this amazing sweet spot. The map above shows the location in Uldum. The above map is from the North West corner of Uldum. The sweet spot contained 5 elementium ore veins every time I passed by. Four of these elementium nodes are viewable at the same time on the mini-map since they are super close to each other. Just to the North East is another elementium vein spawn location that was also always present with this cluster of 4 nodes. NOTE: I was farming without completing any quests, so at this point I am unsure if this node cluster is affected by any of the zone phasing.

AFK Farming Options

One of the things I am constantly looking for are good "AFK Farming" locations. Locations that allow you to camp a character and watch spawns on ores on the mini-map without having to move your character are nice spots. I use these AFK farming locations while I am unable to give full attention to the game, but I am busy working on my computer at the same time.

I just put World of Warcraft into windowed mode and move the window to the top right of my desktop. This allows me to open whatever project I am working on in a seperate window and size it up for most of the screen, while leaving the in-game mini-map up in the top right corner of my desktop. So I am free to browse the internet, work on blog posts, edit screenshots, etc while always keeping an eye out for those little yellow dots to appear on the mini-map signally the respawn of the resource I am watching.

One of the best spots for this in Vanilla WoW was in the Badlands North East of Kargath inside the cave with the rock elementals. By camping near the entrance of the little cave, I could moniter the Iron Ore veins in the immediate area and the occasional Gold or Truesilver node spawn all without having to move my character. Leaving my work in the foreground and game mini-map in the upper background allowed me to multi-task both in and out of the game. This Elementium Ore sweet spot is exactly the type of AFK farming location I am always hunting for. Four nodes all spawning within so close proximity means I can camp this on a flying mount and drop down to gather ores as the veins spawn then return to my other task.

21 comments:

After training mining in Org + getting flying I did as you did and went to Northrend first (instant to Sholazar using engi teleport), which was a great idea.

Went up to 470 there ('cause of +5 glove enchant) and then zipped over to Fuselight in the Badlands where I had cunningly set my HS the day before because it's a very short flight to Twilight Highlands, where you can get elementium @skill 475.

Needn't have bothered really - there was no-one else there and I had everything to myself everywhere whilst I guess other miners where fighting over the obsidium in 80-81 zones.

Either that, or scared of the level 84-85 mobs but they were almost never an issue (though they would quickly kill a lvl 80 in crappy gear) 'cause they are quite a long way away from all the node spawns. I maybe had to vanish once or twice when getting greedy;)

Hit 525 skill (and then hoovered up all that lovely pyrite I had to fly past before!) in the space of about half an hour, and even got the realm first mining feat of strength, as well as a screen-full of 'gtz' spam + a bunch of idiots accusing me of 'hax'...

Having done that I then 'engineered' myself back to Everlook, took short flight to Org, trained illustrious engineering & traded some of my shiny, high-end metals for enough obsidium to make the condenser thingy in combination with the volatile earth I already had.

After that, HS back to Twilight (where I had set it when there earlier), mount up & profit!

15k of it so far from about 4 hours mining like a maniac and being the only person in the zone - almost always had the next node queued up before being finished.

Hell, I levelled 81 just from exploring & mining XP. And I still have tons of stock left - people are only just starting to need (hardened) elementium & pyrite. My best seller so far has been the volatile air (120g+ each) from that awesome engineering gadget which has paid for itself and power-levelling engi to 450 several times over!

Anyway, it may be a day or so late now for this (the levelling hordes are starting to move in), but if it's not crawling with competition, try twilight highlands. The best route is up & down the river and then up & down the two valleys leading back to Wetlands.

If nothing else it'll add some variety, I'm ready to move on and see some new stuff now!

Looks like you did an awesome job. Only problem I see is that you mined all that ore originally without having your condensor already. Thank of all the Volatile Airs you missed out on during your initial run.

Big question I have so far is why does the electrostatic condensor not fit into any of the engineering item toolboxes!?!?!

That's not going to be a sweet spot for long given the huge nerf on mining in Deepholm. It's possible that they will nerf Uldum too, but, given that the mining route in Uldum is limited to the zone walls, they may let it slide as-is. Which means there should be always someone looking to capitalize on that route given you can get about 4 stacks of Elementium Ore per loop.

Tea, this is a great spot. I've noticed it several times and I don't think it's going to end up getting nerfed. Uldum mining seems to me as very contained. It's not a zone wide path, like Sig said it's more confined to the edges.

I've seen this spawn two Pyrite as well, so overall it's a great place to hit.

I use a dual monitor on my wow computer, so that I can read blogs, mail or whatever whenever I am waiting for anything that I can't leave completely alone. It's perfect for posting auctions, I can hit my macro for each thing, while I'm reading something. Same thing with a big craft queue.

IMO, this electrostatic converter is a significant nerf to engineering.

In BC/Wrath, you could collect primal/eternal air/water from gas clouds with just engineering, so you could have another crafting profession. I never really used this to farm, as it would only be more profitable than other business during the start of an xpack like now, and I was out of pocket during the wrath start. But I definitely made some gold from grabbing nodes I happened across on my engineer while doing other stuff.

Now, that's gone, unless you're willing to invest in a gathering profession along with it. Great for now, I suppose, but gah. Obviously I'll need to keep a gatherer max leveled for next expansion. currently all my max level people have profs with recipes I'm not willing to abandon. The more I look at what I want to do in game and out of game, the more I realize there is no way the lvl 52 I put mining on will get to 80 in time to catch any of this wave of super expensive ore. Even if I abandoned everything else I do in game, it would probably not be until after christmas. I don't know how you guys do it.

"Only problem I see is that you mined all that ore originally without having your condensor already. Thank of all the Volatile Airs you missed out on during your initial run."

Well, I did consider that (believe me, I hate to miss out), but by some miracle I managed to log on about 5 minutes after cata launch, so there would have been no mats for it anywhere, forcing me to farm them myself in Hyjal - where everyone else was going - and if my years of gold making in this game have taught me anything it's always do what everyone else isn't!

And I was under the mistaken impression I'd have some competition - I used to own most rare/obscure markets on my (admittedly low population) server, but recently I have noticed various people who must be reading the same gold blogs as I do muscling in on the action, so time was of the essence;)

Oh, and in related news, it seems twilight highlands has been nerfed:

"The tradeskill nodes were too dense in Deepholm and Twilight Highlands for Mining and Herbalism. Several have been removed." (MMO champ)

Was nice while it lasted...I'll sit on my 600+ elementium bars I guess! If it doesn't go up in price after that, well, I still have engineering to level;)

I used my wife's account, and set up my laptop next to my main computer with a mining/eng alt camping that location. The alt is almost at level 81 just from mining that one awesome spot, and I've made almost 10k gold very easily.

The first night of Cata, the 4-pack called to me...I hit it 3 times in less than an hour! At one point, I tapped NINE elementium nodes in less than 2 minutes...the whole zone was empty, it was blissful!

By the next day all the plebes and faster flying farmers had moved in and it was game over for little WoWMidas...

There is another "sweet spot" located by the western side of the wall as well, but you probably know of that by now.

My tactics were to get my Mining up to 500 doing Wintergrasp area, when there was absolutely no one else there at the initial launch of Cata (I was by lvl 76 then, took about 40 mins from 450 to 500) and after that move to Uldum. The first two or three days it was pretty quiet but now there are always like 5-15 ppl farming the walls.

just read this top to bottom....How sad plebes? so because people also need to farm ore and can on their own find locations to do so Name calling is required? Maybe some of you need to go find something else to do with your free time? I have been playing warcraft since 1 then 2 then 3 and now mmo! 7 yrs + in game maxed in every profession etc etc multiple 85s i have 2 farmers 1 sits in dragonblight one sits in stormwind..

When cata went live i leveled my dk from 76-85 herb farming uldum.... I always complain about the nodes and nerfs specially when they failed to bring the hot fix of farmers tapping a node and leaving 1 piece of ore behind to slow other down..that is some sad bullshit right there and ill bet apples to oranges a few of them pricks post right here